Dating relationship tips dealing with rejection

What makes rejection even more painful is that any effort to understand what went wrong can easily lead to bouts of self-criticism and self-blaming.

Dating relationship tips dealing with rejection

So don’t skip that crucial step and do it in your head — write. One of the theories about why rejection causes such sharp emotional pain is that in our distant past, being ostracized from our tribe was pretty much a death sentence.

Consequently, we developed a mechanism to warn us of when we were at danger for being ousted from our tribe and as a result, we became exquisitely sensitive to rejection.

Anyone who enters the dating world is bound to encounter rejection.

Whether your online messages to dating prospects go unanswered, you have a great first date but never hear from the person again, or you get dumped after things were just starting to heat up, all rejections have one thing in common — they really hurt.

Although it’s natural to feel self-critical after a rejection, there is little point in ‘going there’.

Most rejections have much more to do with compatibility and chemistry than they do with any specific shortcoming or flaw.

It probably is anyway, and your self-esteem will thank you for it. Now that you’ve given your self-worth a breather from self-criticism, you need to help it revive.

The best way to revive your self-esteem is to remind yourself of qualities and attributes you possess that you believe are valuable.

You must be, otherwise you wouldn’t hurt so much, right? Here’s why: Recent studies placed people in f MRI machines (scanners that look at what happens in our brains when we’re thinking or doing something) and asked them to think about a painful and recent rejection. The same pathways in the brain became activated when people experienced a rejection as when they experienced physical pain.